May 8, 2007

In light of the fact that I’ve been having a hard time blogging here as of late, and my discovery of tumblr, I think I’m going try something new, at least for a short while. A tumblr blog is a fine cross between an actual blog and a del.icio.us feed — two things I love to fill with content — so my hope is that it will allow me to share all sorts of things in an attractive format.

Henceforth, I will be “scrap-blogging,” as I choose to call it, at this location:

April 24, 2007

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday launched a campaign to rid the country’s sprawling Internet of “unhealthy” content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine, state television reported.

With Hu presiding, the Communist Party Politburo — its 24-member inner council — discussed cleaning up the Internet, state television reported. The meeting promised to place the often unruly medium more firmly under propaganda controls.

“Development and administration of Internet culture must stick to the direction of socialist advanced culture, adhere to correct propaganda guidance,” said a summary of the meeting read on the news broadcast.

April 18, 2007

On the Foreign Policy website, you can read a fascinating collection of survey data about the attitudes of London Muslims compared to the British public at large. As the commentary notes,

A 2006 Pew poll of the British public found that British Muslims, when asked to cite the source of their primary identity, overwhelmingly chose their faith, while the majority of the British public chose their country. The finding set off alarm bells in a nervous Britain still reeling from the 7/7 attacks and was widely cited as proof that the country suffers from a crisis of integration.

The chart looks like this:

This comes as no surprise: the British public, largely secular and post-Christian, does not suffer from the conflict of interest between religion and state (God and Caesar, as Christ put it). What is surprising is that this does not prevent British Muslims from identifying themselves as Brits and as Muslims:

This is most fascinating, and, from my perspective, a cause for optimism, especially when coupled with this chart:

British Muslims strongly believe that getting a good education and becoming involved in public life are the most important aspects of integrating. Presumably, following survey data with which we’re all familiar, as the Muslim public becomes better educated and more fully integrated into a post-religious society, they will become less attached to their faith, and perhaps even just as tolerant and cosmopolitan as those 78% of Brits who don’t think becoming less religious is important…

April 17, 2007

I’ve spent at least an hour in the past two weeks trying to trick Verizon’s automated messaging system into putting me through too a person. Turns out I should have been saying “Agent” over and over again.